@subigo said: Back that statement up. I say putting NTP on production servers is one of the dumbest things ever.

I say there are environments where having closely synchronized clocks is a requirement. Kerberos-based environments for example. Coordination with external partners where time is significant is another. Not all environments like a brute-force daily time change where the clock jumps forward a half-second or two.

PAD said it is "useless" which means there are absolutely no uses whatsoever.

@raindog308 said: I say there are environments where having closely synchronized clocks is a requirement. Kerberos-based environments for example. Coordination with external partners where time is significant is another. Not all environments like a brute-force daily time change where the clock jumps forward a half-second or two.

PAD said it is "useless" which means there are absolutely no uses whatsoever.

I think he's just saying there's no reason to use a service to get and set time, when you already have a service installed that can do it for you (cron).

I've had so many issues with NTP in the past that I refuse to ever use it on an important production server again. Instead, I have a series of pages across the Internet like this one: http://94.249.244.181/date.php

...then on production servers I just setup a cron to grab that page and set the date every ten minutes.

@NickM said: ntpd does the job, and it does it well. Using cron for this, on the other hand, is a hackish solution, at best.

Bullshit. NTP has had so many bugs over the years it's retarded. One of my first VPS nodes crashed daily for about a week and it ended up being a fast clock that NTP choked on while trying to sync. You realize NTP is a cron that does nothing more than grab the time from other servers, correct?

Went off without a hitch. I don't know why people think Debian is more stable than Ubuntu. Ubuntu, even in non-LTS releases, has always been more stable for me, and they accomplish this in 2 months of beta testing compared to Debian's 6-7 months.

Oh yeah, I should point out that one of the links on that ServerFault page said that :60 is not POSIX compliant. That's why Red Hat counts 23:59:59 twice. Notice that Ubuntu ignores the POSIX specification and makes a system that just works.

Yeah, but software with hundreds of open bugs, most of which are over a year old, is retarded when that software is nothing more than a time sync.

And don't be stupid. Did you even read that PHP bug report (yeah, I saw it on Hacker News too)? Are you going to tell me that using date(); and pulling that number via a bash script is somehow more complex than NTP? I do in 10 lines of code what NTP does in tens of thousands.

And who says you have to use your own server to pull data from? There's a million places to pull official atomic time and NTP time (like, I don't know, maybe the NTP pool servers)... or if you don't like that: http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/cgi-bin/timer.pl

Seriously people... do you even know what NTPd is doing? It's pinging one of the external pool servers and then setting the OS time. That's it. Nothing else.

@subigo said: Seriously people... do you even know what NTPd is doing? It's pinging one of the external pool servers and then setting the OS time. That's it. Nothing else.

Actually, it's a little more complicated than that. It measures the delay between your server and the ntp server, and a bunch of other stuff. ntpd is almost always going to more accurate than anything you're going to claim is "just as good".

@NickM said: Actually, it's a little more complicated than that. It measures the delay between your server and the ntp server, and a bunch of other stuff. ntpd is almost always going to more accurate than anything you're going to claim is "just as good".

Right... it pings the NTP pool and takes the average of the most similar times in the pool and then sets the OS time accordingly.

So you're installing an entire service package so you can sync your system up with a pool... great. And then if your clock happens to be out of sync too much, ntpd will refuse to set the time (unless you override it) and sometimes goes into a loop, crashing your server. Or one of the other hundreds of bugs that happen when ntpd doesn't feel like running correctly.

I run a simple cron to keep my network in sync and it has worked for years. Over the course of a year, my time might (MIGHT) be off by 1-2 minutes when compared to the NTP pool. And if I really cared about syncing up with the NTP pool (which I do not), I could simply run ntpd on the server that my crons pull from. If you did that, you'd be in sync with the pool and you wouldn't even have to run the ntpd service.

I don't care who you are or what you say... running an entire buggy service to keep in sync with another network pool will never be as safe and as simple as:

I've used ntpd on all of my servers, for years, with 0 problems. And you're acting like ntpd is some huge daemon that eats your RAM and disk and CPU, but it's not. It's less than a megabyte installed, and uses 1.8MB of RAM. You may not need or want your servers to have a reliable date and time, but I do, and most other people do. In fact, as mentioned before, it's required for many services.

@nickM agreed I have customers who expect the time on their VM's to be correct, and some programs require it, Exim will crash occasionally if the time goes backwards and NTPD running fixed that issue on one of our email servers strangely, we noticed the clock over a 24 hour period was getting off by nearly a minute so we sync the clock every 15 minutes on that node. Onboard clocks are not designed to be terribly accurate hence the need for syncing often, I have some servers that it's a requirement for them to sync every minute to a installed GPS system to make sure were within +-5ms of GPS time to ensure logs are accurate. Those of us with cisco gear using msec on our logs also require this to resolve certain complicated problems that creep up in the software with cisco TAC.

@NickM said: I've used ntpd on all of my servers, for years, with 0 problems. And you're acting like ntpd is some huge daemon that eats your RAM and disk and CPU, but it's not. It's less than a megabyte installed, and uses 1.8MB of RAM.

Not everyone has flood insurance, but everyone who has had their houses washed away in a flood does.

@NickM said: You may not need or want your servers to have a reliable date and time, but I do, and most other people do. In fact, as mentioned before, it's required for many services.

Maybe you missed the part where my servers are always just as on time as any server running ntpd. And I certainly haven't come across any services that require ntpd to be running... on OpenVZ nodes or shared servers.

You guys can all run ntpd for the rest of your lives. I don't care what services you run, at all. I'm just telling you that ntpd is buggy, has always been buggy, and you're lucky it's never caused you problems.

My debian and RHEL machines were all fine, but all three of my Ubuntu boxes (desktop machines, 2 Lucid, 1 Precise) went wonkers. The CPU was crazy busy. I tried killing and restarting things but they just wouldn't run right. A reboot fixed everything.